Sure. And when you've played with STL for a while you start wanting vectors, strings, dequeues and so on.

True, but lets not forget we're programming for a microcontroller (limited code and data space). I use many of the STL algorithms and containers in my desktop programs.

The overhead of the simpler containers is minimal. As for the more expensive ones, well that's a tradeoff you'll need to make. If you have the space, what the heck. If you're making thousands of something, then I can understand you want to use the smallest (cheapest) CPU possible.

I would love for someone to do some performance testing with the various STL implementations with avr-gcc. I use C++Builder on the desktop, and it uses the dinkumware's STL libraries which is optimized for MSVC. It turns out those optimizations are not optimal for C++Builder. As a result, the implementation for C++Builder is not that efficient.